There was something about the way he grazed my arm and looked at me as if it was the very first time. It wasn't. I love the feeling of mutual gratitude for the discovery of something so rare, so beautifully elusive. Isn't it incredible how desperately you might have needed something without realizing it? How gracefully and completely a hole can be occupied and sealed and grant you a satisfaction you didn't quite realize you'd needed so terribly until satisfaction overwhelmed you? It's like tasting ice cream for the first time, the texture, the sweetness, the way the flavor devours you right where you stand leaving you to wonder how you'd ever felt like an intact human being before tasting it. You probably don't remember tasting ice cream for the first time. You were too young. You were too spoiled with experience but you're far from providential if you never know what it is to lack, to be without; if you can't recall your world without ice cream.

"Your body is touching mine. I never would have believed it possible a year ago. I love you."

Life is funny and strange and I've decided I am an authentic part of her plot. I'd always felt like a reader to the story of a life. The transition to participant is a little startling.

But... Careful not to allow happiness consume so much of you that you've forgotten the sound of sadness. Vulnerability. Being careful is only an excuse for armor. Remembering sadness is only a defense against imminent pain. Vulnerability and I have never been friends. Vulnerability and I have always warred against my better judgment. My head rules over my heart more often than my heart should allow. My heart takes much too long to heal. Hurt is prolonged and indefinite. Vulnerability equates to hurt and hurt is the memory of ice cream but the unduly possibility you'll ever taste it again.

I don’t want people to matter to me too much. Sometimes it hurts too much to think about them. Ones you love who don’t love you, ones who hate you, ones who you think about but never get to be with. I like people but when I get too close, it fucks me up.

— Henry Rollins

I have fashioned an existence too similar to that of my mother's. The only path to happiness is through pain. Forgoing one is forgoing the other. Say this every day like a mantra your very life depends upon.

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If someone had asked me 10 years ago if I would plan to take self-portraits should I ever get pregnant the answer would have likely been a resounding yes. To document such drastic changes in this vessel I inhabit and be able to add that to my body of work, which was then and still occupied by so many beautiful and various female bodies I've photographed over the years? Well, of course. Ten years later when prompted with that question by several someones, my answer wasn't so certain, maybe even doubtful.

When I became lost in the separation of child and mother, Of myself and the otherWhen I became lost you became foundYou climbed on to the backs of birds andsailed between land and space for milesYour back covered in feathers as black as the sky on a moonless nighteach freckle an understudy for the veiled stars

I met Melissa, this red-lipped, beautifully inked, raven-haired woman less than 6 months ago. One day, nearly two months ago she confessed her love to me for Banksy’s balloon girl. She said she was dying to recreate it in a photograph for someone special to her, but wanted a snowy-filled backdrop. She wanted that vibrant red heart balloon to pop off a clean white setting.

My husband and I recently participated in an Atlas Obscura event to get a peek inside the Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado. I'd actually never heard of this place before a friend sent me a link for the AO tour event only days prior to the meet-up. Needless to say, I was hooked and immediately bought tickets.

"Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world."

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” ―Diane Setterfield

The trip was of course, wonderful, until the last 30 minutes of the drive home when Serenica's engine began stalling on us whenever we'd drop beneath a certain speed (hoping it's a minor fix!). Fortunately, after stalling out on several occasions and getting it restarted again, she died right inside our RV storage lot gate and wouldn't turn over.